IT Integration in M & A Post Announce through Full Integration
A global legal process outsourcing (LPO) company providing eDiscovery, managed services and litigation support, agreed to purchase a provider of litigation support and information management solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments as a carveout from an unaffiliated enterprise. The transaction was the largest in the client’s history, substantially expanding its presence both inside the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia.
The Challenge
This was a unique IT integration because most of the technology, applications, and data to be migrated from the seller’s data center to the buyer’s data center were not enablers of the business but, as the sole means of revenue generation, they were the business. The migration involved several commercial and proprietary applications in U.S. and U.K. data centers, numerous domestic and foreign field office locations, global and local compliance considerations, and several petabytes of business data.
DivIHN was engaged by the client to provide IT Integration Program Management and Technical Advisory Services from the late stages of due diligence through the completion of integration. The team also provided Enterprise Architecture expertise, TSA and IT vendor management assistance, and Network and Advanced Storage Systems Engineering resources.
DivIHN was engaged by the client to provide IT Integration Program Management and Technical Advisory Services from the late stages of due diligence through the completion of integration. The team also provided Enterprise Architecture expertise, TSA and IT vendor management assistance, and Network and Advanced Storage Systems Engineering resources.
Our Solution
Over the course of a year-long engagement, we provided IT Integration Program Management from pre-close through Day One and completing at post-close integration. Our Enterprise Architects and Advanced Storage Systems engineers developed and implemented solutions to migrate several petabytes of business data maintaining full concurrency between the Seller’s data center to the Buyer’s data center to allow for parallel testing, and ultimately, a rapid cutover. The related applications continued to be supported for several months on the Seller’s systems (under a TSA) while the Buyer’s application teams built the necessary application environments in their data center.
Our network engineers assisted the buyer in the transition of acquired field offices in the United States and abroad, including redesign of the local networks and the migration of those offices from an MPLS-based network to a VPN-mesh-based network for data, telephony, and physical security. We managed the transfer or decommissioning of several hundred IT assets and services in the U.S. and international locations. Finally, our team developed the IT portion of the buy-side TSA and managed this for much of the M&A integration lifecycle.
Our network engineers assisted the buyer in the transition of acquired field offices in the United States and abroad, including redesign of the local networks and the migration of those offices from an MPLS-based network to a VPN-mesh-based network for data, telephony, and physical security. We managed the transfer or decommissioning of several hundred IT assets and services in the U.S. and international locations. Finally, our team developed the IT portion of the buy-side TSA and managed this for much of the M&A integration lifecycle.
Highlights
At the end of the project, the acquired field offices were successfully migrated to the buyer’s network infrastructure, the revenue-generating applications and associated massive data stores were transitioned to the buyer’s U.S. and U.K data centers and the business was successfully transitioned without impact to the client’s law sector end customers.